La Cie hard drive not mounting

Some time ago I was having a similar problem, as were several other enraged iMac users in that discussion thread.

Although nothing was ever formally identified as the cause my problem seemed to be a conflict with my iSight webcam. When the webcam was connected I would often but not always lose the icon.

When I disconnected iSight the icons were back and the disks were fine.

If you have an iSight webcam try disconnecting and see if that helps.

Good luck.

iMac G4 17", PowerBook G4 15" Mac OS X (10.4.5)

iMac G4 17", PowerBook G4 15" Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Good Luck with LaCie. Didn't help me. I was told to disconnect the iSight from my Mini also. Still didnt work. Another LaCie dropped off my new iBook. Exactly the same as what happened to you. 2 strike outs with that company. Wasn't heading for 3rd! I use SmartDisk drives now and they work fine. The small portable one-the FireLite- is real nice. Small, quiet (no fan), never gets hot, barely hear the disk spin unless it is really working hard and it always mounts perfectly. I also hear the drives from OWC are good too. And I think they are cheaper. I have nothing against LaCie. They get great reviews but I have had no luck with their hard drives at all.

man, i'm having the same problem with my G5 and my xternal lacie d2 as i mentioned in my other posts, the same exact problem. however, it DOES mount on my g4 ibook, so i don't know what's going on. anyone know how i can SAFELY move the info from the D2 to the iBook to the iMac G5? I'd like to move it, wipe it clean and restore it before I have any more problems with it.

The LaCie design by Porsche series use the Prolific FireWire chipset, I believe, whereas the D2 series usually uses Oxford. I think that's correct. The Oxford chipsets are good for OS 10.1x-10.2x, and for 10.3.7 and up. They had a lot of problems for 10.3.0 thru 10.3.6, which were fixed with 10.3.7, and for all 10.4.x. There were different kinds of problems depending on the version of OSX and the specific firmware on the FW - ATA bridge in the HD enclosure. The Prolific chipset is somewhat flaky about mounting, being detected by programs, etc, for all OSX, as far as I can tell. The bottom line for me is: Make sure the FireWire HD uses Oxford chipset 911 (FW 400) or 912/922 (FW800/400), and if you're stuck on 10.3x, update it to 10.3.7. And get the latest firmware update from the vendor if you have an older HD. That's the best help I can give. Hope it does some good. Dale Meyn.

Ruski,
What Dayle said is on the money for the hardware. One thing you could try is connecting the Porsche Design LaCie drive to one of the firwire ports on a known 911 drive or even try a hub. Did you use all the firmware updaters available from LaCie? Using the built in bridgeboard or any hub (don't connect two computers or loop) can work even if your chipset is completely unsupported, so it's worth a try.

You shouldn't have to reformat and lose all your data. You can always move the drive itself to another enclosure as a last resort or go to something expensive like drivesavers (sp?). Follow the basic tips as well:

1) Unplug everything from your mac when shutdown (including power cable) LET SIT for a few minutes, restart and try adding peripherals one at a time (keyboard and mouse on restart for obvious reasons).
2) Depending on your machine you may be able to perform some keypress resets like nvram and pram w/ open firmware.

You can also try hooking it up to a different computer, although as far as seeing a drive I think the imacs have been 'more compatible'. That's my experience and your mileage may vary.

Good Luck,
-j

I had a similar problem with my La Cie HD. While the drive did not appear on the desktop, Disk Utility did recognize it, but it was unable to repair the dirve because of an invalid sibling link. This means that the drive directory had been damaged and OS X couldn't find its way through and it completely failed to mount (it occurred after a power failure while I was deleting a large folder).

I used Disk Warrior to rebuild the directory and it now mounts and is running fine. There seems to have been no loss of data: all of my folders and files are there (it even recovered the one that I was in the process of deleting; I of course did not check if any data was lost there, and just went ahead and trashed it again).

Disk Warrior is a pretty handy utility, well worth having.

I hope this works. Good luck.

iMac G5 20 in Mac OS X (10.4.6) la Cie d2 195 G, la Cie Porshe design 250 G

PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.3.7)

PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.3.7)

Hi
I know that the format of an external hard drive has to be FAT32 to be recognised by mac OC X
so check this first

hope it helped

Eric

Actually, a Mac with OS X Tiger can recognize PC formatted HDs, but can only read, can't write to them. Also, of course, Macs can read and write HFS and HFS plus HDs, that''s Mac "native" format. FAT 32 is a "universal" format that both Macs and PCs can read/write, it's used when somebody uses both computer systems with the same HD. Dale.

Wow, I'm so glad I stumbled on this discussion. I have a brand new Mac Mini and LaCie "mini" 250 GB external drive (the one that looks like a Mac Mini and is meant to sit under it.) I got the drive, transferred about 100 GB of data onto it from my old computer, then hooked it up to the Mac Mini and started using it. Nothing else hooked up, no other firewire devices, just the Mini and the LaCie drive.

After about an hour, I suffered a crash on the Mac -- mouse pointer was responsive, but nothing else, and I ended up doing a hard reboot. (Still not sure what caused the crash, and that's rather disturbing.) When the system came back up the LaCie drive wouldn't mount. Disk utility could see it, but wouldn't mount it, same as everyone else. (Oddly, the Disk Utility log says "Mount succeeded.")

Trying to repair the drive with Disk Utility quickly gets "Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit." There's no new data on the drive yet so I don't have much interest in trying to do anything more labor-intensive to rescue it, although I figure all or most of my data is still there.

I think I'm just returning this drive. I love the form factor and the design to go with the Mini, but if it's going to lose my data after an hour of use, it's not for me. (On the other hand, what if it was the fault of the Mini crashing and not LaCie at all?)

- Ert


Mac Mini Intel Dual Core Mac OS X (10.4.6) Also a MacBook Pro 15" and a B&W G3